Glimpses

Since starting ‘Navigating Cyril’ I’ve become fascinated by early 20th C postcards of the town in which so many of my family lived. I’m fortunate in that Matlock Bath had long been a popular inland resort and so has been generously served by souvenir postcards from the mid-Victorian period onwards.

For me the postcards have a life beyond being simply an accessible pictorial record, they provoke associations and recovered memories, they’re about family and a means by which I’m slowly making ‘re-connections’.

Each month I scour e-bay and the like, to see what new offerings are available. i don’t spend silly amounts of money on any single card, and few pounds at most, and the criteria for selecting one postcard over another are pretty wide-ranging

Does the image show family houses, ie. houses occupied by the Lill’s, Allen’s or Edmond’s?

Does the image tell a story? Or add to a story already known?

Is the image ‘odd’? etc. etc.

I find it moving to hold the postcards, to have in an album something that was around at the turn of the 20th Century. I enjoy reading the handwritten and wonderfully banal comments people sent to loved ones, or weaving a story around the simplest of texts ‘Having a grand time Lizzie’.

Most of all though the postcards act as a window or conduit, a means of accessing a period long gone. Postcards are paused, poised snapshots; freeze-framing a particular moment which is then replicated a thousand-fold, to become a momentary part of someone’s life. Many of the postcards are simply views, of the ‘We Were Here’ variety, on one level they’re a (fascinating) record of the town, of particular buildings; but for the purchaser they must have had (at the moment of purchase) other associations, perhaps they were part of numberless human dramas?